It seems like the Cashaa CEO Kumar Gaurav has partnered with an NBFC in Jaipur to launch a new website called Unicas which allows you to buy some crypto and also to open real branches in Jaipur.

Jaipur is a tourist destination so if anybody is there the next time, could you verify what kind of services are they offering. It will be important to know that by what way they are providing custody of the BTC to their customers or if it is going to be a custodial service.

Due to their past record of losing customer funds, I am keeping this here as a potential scam investigation.

Ahha Cashaa. Now where have I heard of this before? Mr. Kumar Gaurav who has a website of fake credentials and sells ponzi MLMs to newbies. The other partner "United Multistate credit cooperative society" is a typical Indian NBFC with word of mouth credentials at best.

While the step is commendable, I will be eager to see what exactly do these people come up with and will they actually take it to 100 branches as claimed. The official website of the NBFC does not show any such announcement on their press release officially. So there is a possibility they they will just use this to garnish their credentials because of a crypto website mentioning their name. BTW, This has become a classic scammer tactic in India. Unknown online websites that refer each other for a facade of legitimacy.

They want you to buy their token "CAS" for additional interest on deposits. That is ~INR 25000 (300 USD) for pretty much opening an account. Also reminds me of Amit Bhardwaj's MCAPs.

From the past of Cashaa, that held BTC deposits in a web wallet, i doubt they are the kind of "bank" to do serious business with.

I wrote that before I watched "Dirty Money" just last night on Netflix. There's an episode where Jared Kushner's company forces one of their tenants into a litigation and the court "garnishes" the bank account of the single mother of three to pay the illegal fine. With that viewpoint, I can see how it is terrifying to know that none of your money will ever be free from Govt intervention. It also made me better understand why US citizens are so adamant about keeping Bitcoin holdings private. It is an insurance from Govt tyranny. The rest of the world doesn't experience this at the levels of working class people as much as developed world. This is the reason that people like us, at times, forget to appreciate the privacy of Bitcoin.

Going back to my original point though, What i meant is that as the Govt comes to realize that US citizens hold a lot of value, they will do everything in their power to get their hands on it. If the price of bitcoin gets to a million, Will it let it go unchallenged that a set of people have so much power?? Bitcoin holdings are enormously concentrated right now. If this "rich-list" is correct, 62% of all coins are in wallets with >100 BTC belonging to some 16000 addresses (including Satoshi's million).

Is that sustainable without organized and motivated actions from such OG hodlers themselves? Is that healthy for the society??
I guess that this means people will need to be ready to organize some sort of legal defense to justify their right to privacy AND to hold Bitcoin as Bitcoin because it is not Government issued money. It is just code that they choose to value. Like a valuable piece of art. Though, that too is taxable if you auction it off for millions. Now i see that it is going to be difficult.

Do people have a plan??

If the wall street and American millionaires have so much stake in bitcoin that the Govt is potentially afraid of it then it can only mean one thing: The wealth has soared to such a extent that Govt is not comfortable with the "cut" it got from all that appreciation.

Its hard to know how much of the BTC price is affected by rich OGs in America or the bankers who have been buying it since 2013-14. The most that the Govt can probably do is to ask people to put into public their holdings or risk investigations. This will lead to a bit of selling and a few Americans applying for Visas.  This can also lead to a bit of dip, which I feel is good for the rest of the world and for me.

What else can be done to regulate it? Would they go to the extent of price regulation or holding regulation? What exactly should the community be afraid of when we talk about "regulation"?

If someone wants to use their Bitcoin wealth in risky but creative ways, they don't have many options except using either these wrapped tokens or by simply converting it to stablecoins and providing deposits to borrower-lender platforms. WBTC and RBTC will let you do that because they are on Ethereum where most of these other platforms are.

L-BTC is essentially blockstream's answer to the BTC rich OGs. The fact that it supports CTs is thus, important. Other important thing which makes it viable for OGs is that it has a set of partners which mainly includes exchanges. So I suppose, if you are a bitcoin OG, L-BTC is the solution if you want to play with all that money. Isn't that a use case? Its the only use-case that money has ever had.

Since when did Indians start taking decision based on who is the right man for the job or who performed well..LOL..That goes against our culture. We have things like experience, prestige and "raula" to take care of. So right now, Kohli's and Shastri's "Raula" is too much to lead to any such change.
No offense to Kohli as he is the best batsman out there but Shastri has a parasitic relationship with him. He takes care of Kohli's ego and Kohli returns the favor. That dynamic is pretty much visible between the two. So performance or no performance, Rahane will be back where he belongs until Team India performs badly, which is quite difficult considering the talented bunch of individuals there are.

Not just crypto e-commerce, any new e-commerce website will find it hard to work in the current scenario in India. The space requires software engineers, which India is so good at producing that even its mechanical engineers are better at it than the rest. (Metallurgical, to be accurate). The other important ingredient is cheap labor, plenty of which is available in India, thanks to the 2 crore pakoda-wala jobs that the great NaMo has bestowed upon the youth saving us from the perils of demographic dividend.

As far as discounts are considered, that needs far more volatility and a lower entry point to have some returns. Back when BTC was a few thousand rupees, the uptick potential for e-commerce would have been huge. Viability of such a business can be quite a challenge now. Although not impossible with the right modelling and pricing. (Well, I think I have thought myself out of my initial assertion, it is indeed possible but with novel effort and far more expertise.)

Rather than e-commerce, I think the first thing that crypto needs in India is consolidation. Better applications and a better experience. The crypto applications as of now are either shitty exchange apps (Talking to you WazirX) or unreliable, shady loan applications. I think the market is ripe for well-designed, L2 network based apps about almost anything that apps can be.

I agree that all the value flowing into Ethereum or Alt-coins is because of Bitcoin. That does not mean that anybody in this space, especially the newbies who have more time than money, can afford to ignore the products that some of these projects are genuinely trying to make profitable. I follow quite a few projects in the Alt-space not because I just want insane returns but because some of them have legitimate teams putting effort to change the way we interact with finance.

That will certainly have some value in the long term. But its not for the faint of heart and the most that a normal person can expect is to benefit from the knowledge or have minor return commensurate to effort put. The insane returns typically go to the person who has the most money to throw around, which again are the BTC millionaires from an earlier era.


Rightly said. The predictions and models are for professional traders. For most common people, not having a stake in bitcoin is an opportunity cost. Yet, as a small guy, you have to accept that the time when BTC turned small guys into big guys is pretty much over now. What you should focus on is to manage your crypto portfolio with responsibility.

The corporatization of BTC and institutional investors coming in is also one of the reasons I don't believe in actively dissing Alt-coins anymore.

I don't worry about this Gold vs Bitcoin FUD as it probably helps those of us who see value in BTC to accumulate more. Bitcoin is irreplaceable not just because it is the first but because it is the only PoW crypto with this network effect and hashing power. Not to forget the base of developers and open source hobbyist who are building on Bitcoin.
Tomorrow if something recreates all of this, they can well have a chance to claim the supremacy that Bitcoin enjoys. Till then, try to understand the pro-bitcoiner argument better.


Without civilization, nothing is of value. Honestly though, if we were somehow thrust back into the pre-computing era suddenly due to some semi-apocalyptic event, Bitcoin won't retain the value that Gold would. In a "Mortal Engines" sort of future, you'll be better off with gold.

Yet, comparing utility of Gold vs Bitcoin is just stupid. Gold is ONLY Store of Value. With Bitcoin, you can do whatever you can do with code. Its a piece of code residing everywhere but under the control of your private keys. Gold has nothing of that sort. You cannot prove to someone that you have gold without actually exposing yourself to danger and coercion. You can do that way more easily with Bitcoin.

 

Who would have thought. 10 runs from 4 overs. Pant still ON..And a FOURRRR..!!

The Aussies aren't gonna forget this match and this series for a long long time to come. The way India resisted and just carried n despite injuries, nobody had given a chance to the Indians. Amazing team effort and Amazing game of cricket this one.

WON!!

India wins the Border-Gavaskar series trophy while Australia lose their first test at The Gabba in the last 28 years. Historic..!!

+1

There has been enough drama as well as heroics in this series for a documentary. It has been a long time that Test matches have been so exciting. Not just that, the grit and resilience shown by the Indian team are quite an uplifting story amid the pandemic.

The Australian team too needs to be acknowledged for what they are. Never relenting and always trying to destroy the opponents. That explains the frustration that they have gone through when not being able to follow through and dominate. The bad blood in the media notwithstanding, India and Australia together really define two very different brands of cricket characteristic of their different hemispheres. These two teams are essentially saving and growing cricket.

Really depends on what you have invested in and how much. I doubt any retail investors, including I believe you, care about "voting" what direction a publicly listed corporation takes if you buy their stock. You just buy it based on personal judgement that it will give returns. Sometimes you invest in whole sectors, judging that the sector will go up. Those are mature markets with variety of hedging techniques too.

Compare that to crypto where from innovators are already trying to get people involved through governance tokens. You can actually stake simple stablecoins on these platform, earn back their governance tokens and have an actual say in the decision making process with your vote. I think that is more "voting right" or atleast as equal as any that a stock market share will give you.

EDIT: I pretty much disagree that BTC is stocks on steroids. Just because its volatile doesn't mean that its only meant for trading. If you day-trade, you WILL lose to smarter and luckier people. If you just Hodl, it only benefits in the long run. So BTC is far from stocks. Rest of the crypto though is the wildest west that a stock market can be.

You are right. It makes no sense if you are just trying to make money by using some sort of "loan facility". The collateralized loans are being used quite a lot on major DeFi platforms. The traders who have significant crypto holdings, tend to hold several of these coins. For them a few hundred thousand worth of crypto in a coin which is trading sideways is lost opportunity cost.

So they will take a collateralized loan, borrowing a stablecoin which can then be used for riskier investments and hopefully earn back better returns compared to what they pay as interest. The ETH fee costs that you quote don't remain such a big issue when you are moving around 100K. That is why, I keep repeating that DeFi in its current form is really not for the small guy, no matter what is being said.

There are teams that are working to find a solution to this pretty hard problem. Its an evolving scenario for the time being.

Thanks for proving what you really are. Can't expect more commitment or brainstorming from a BCH shiller except the typical "I am right, BTC should change because TV changed" argument.

When will you boneheads realize that there is a huge difference between all the kind of consumer technologies you guys quote and Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the secure, permissionless and foundational network layer for a new kind of money. People are ascribing value to all the other decentralized digital assets because Bitcoin enables that confidence. It is not a software plaything with low barrier of understanding so that it can be a hobbyist dev's plaything. That is the case with stuff like ETH, DeFi, ICOs, Solidity and all the others that people like you get inspired by and then turn to ask "Why can't Bitcoin do this?"

That does not mean that Bitcoin isn't moving fast enough in terms of innovation. It is. Its just not as glamorous as declaring 10000 TPS like a PoS shitcoin.

In continuation of this, it just occurred to me that any attempt at dynamically calculating the "miner fees" based on mempool transactions will automatically open up the network to all sort of nuisance attacks.

Not sure if I am thinking this correctly but a malicious actor could simply spam the chain with hundreds and thousands of transactions with bare minimum fee. The transactions just stay there, never being picked due to the very low fees and screwing up your calculations. You end up making an elegantly sybil-resistance system welcoming to the most basic of sybil attacks and manipulation.

The cases have taken an upsurge through the winters and there have been deaths in cases that worsened. It is still very unpredictable how COVID impacts individual bodies. The vaccination is targeted as of now needing registration. It will be available to general public only in the next few months. Till then, it is much better to continue taking precautions.

Its a matter of satisfaction though that a functional vaccine has been made available publicly. The distancing measures and mask wearing should continue to be engaged.

Recent troubles of the economy aren't just due to COVID but structural. COVID was just the last straw on the camel's back in a situation that had been worsening for the past 2-3 years. Till we have a more trustful environment in terms of sheer shenanigans from the Govt, there will not be an upsurge in investment. Just see the latest drama involving Guswami and BARC.

With a government busy in cultural appropriation and media focused solely on cult-politics and religion, while ignoring actual suffering of the working middle class, hoping for an automatic recovery is difficult.

Exchanges are not the only way for people to get into cryptocurrencies or to use them. If someone uses a centralized exchange and wishes to take out his profit from trading, that cannot be an anonymous exercise. Trading implies that you are willing to share your identity. Whether you use a centralized stablecoin or DAI, does not matter then.

If what you making use of your crypto gains by turning them into Fiat, what do you need the privacy for?

If you want to stay private, who is stopping you from keeping your crypto safe and utilizing it without converting to Fiat?

The question is not really about empty blocks. All miners don't work on the same set of transactions from the mempool. It can happen that some  miner arrives at the next acceptable hash immediately, rather than 10 mins after the current block.


If you are just calculating from the mempool then it becomes unrelated to the actual set of transactions you want to affect price-wise. This continuous variation also puts another set of calculations, consensus requirement and propagation delays for the miners to calculate, especially if you talk about adjusting size in every block. I don't think this is feasible.

Some kind of DAO based variation over periods of high fees maybe a different thing but that opens up to politics and is entirely not suited to Bitcoin's mathematical purity. That is why I have been asking if you have seen an actual implementation or you plan to think this over and then come up with calculations.

I think you should move this topic to "Bitcoin Discussion" already.

Please stop giving shitty advice to people in the times of volatility and a pandemic. TRX is shittiest worst shitcoin that can ever be. Second only to frauds like XRP. If there is anything that someone witha limit of 100 USD should buy, that is BTC.
Right now, things are at ATH so I'd advice to buy just 50 USD worth of BTC and place an order for 50 USD at a lower entry point. Buying ETH with the remaining 50 USD would also be fine. Just DO NOT put money into any of the others if you do not have money you can afford to play with.

I don't think it would be unhealthy even if it goes to 20K. It was only still trading at 12K for a large part of this year. 20K would still be a win compared to a lot of others. These upswings would have allowed atleast some of the Bitcoin supporters of the past 3 years (since the last ATH) to profit a bit and recover.

I am all for them having the chance to stack up a bit more bitcoin. 20K is not affordable for a lot of people. Anything above a month's income for an average developing country household is a great point for Bitcoin price. That is anything upwards of 1K USD.